Derby Talk

Derby Talk is a forum for Pinewood Derby, Awana Grand Prix, Kub Kar Rally, Shape N Race Derby, Space Derby, Raingutter Regatta and other similar races where a child and an adult work together to create a race vehicle and a lot of fun and memories

In early October, AOL announced that they were getting out of the web hosting business effective October 31, 2008. I've still got 25 days (or thereabout) to move my several hundred web pages from my 13 year old AOL site to www.stanpope.net. Gonna take a bit of coding changes but it is doable!

All of the stuff ... ppngen, PW computation tools, etc. ... will reside on the site that I established a couple years ago to house just a few pages to be a "permanent" access path to my web site. I bought a few more GB of storage and bandwidth for www.stanpope.net, and will get it all up in the next few days.

I don't know about the associated AOL email addresses when I quit paying AOL for the account. I may lose them. In any case, I'll be making email addys at stanpope.net my primary email, too! (Lots of subscriptions, etc. to update!)

There's a lot of bookmarks to my members.aol.com/standcmr site floating about, and I'm keeping the same page names under stanpope.net. So, if you get a page not found in the AOL site try substituting "www.stanpope.net" in place of "members.aol.com/standcmr".

Sorry for the trouble it may cause you ... just think, though, about the trouble it is causing me!

I havr no doubt that you have already received dozens of offers to assist... might I recommend that when you purchase your hosting package... do so by choosing linux and install wordpress. the benefits I have received by this choise of content management systems (cms) are many:

1. an enormous community of authors, writers, and designers who have created tools, gizmos, design layouts, etc... 98% of which cost exactly nothing to use on a non-commercial site.
2. php as a website building language stores the content in a database, allowing you to alter the layout of the site without having to re-code each and every page.
3. wordpress itself is free, and is capable of producing a site that never looks like a "free" site...

here is just a feew examples of what a wordpress built site can do. aside from the cost of hosting... the elements of these sites were completely without costs

Well, my web site is "back in business" as of a couple days ago. I was locked out of DT for a couple days cuz of the email addy change and could not update the status here.

http://stanpope.net/ is up and running, and around the end of the month, http://members.aol.com/standcmr/ will be no more! For as long as it lasts, I replaced all the pages on the old site with pages to "flip" to the corresponding page of the new site after advising of the URL change and suggesting updating bookmarks. Happily, all of these pages have identical text with a javascript that extracts and applies the page name. It would have been nice if I could put a "catch" page in (just once) instead, but I couldn't find any support for that. So, I have 200+ pages replaced with the new 4-line html text!

Things are generally good, except for a couple of pages that use forms to initiate email. The cgi's are different here. I did discover a few more malformed gif files and repaired them. (Something in my old graphics package had created gif files with two different dimension attributes. The actual size and 600X800. Late browsers like Safari displayed the entire 600X800 area with lotsa black below and to the right of the actual intended image.

And I discovered a few bad links and email addys and repaired most of them ... parametrically, using javascripts and single-point specification of value. All email addys and all host url are in one file so next time (hopefully never) the move will be much easier. All-in-all, it was a successful (allbeit stressful) couple of days.

For those whose LD's match mine, feel free to copy my util.js file to use as-is or to adapt. In I.E. http://stanpope.net/util.js allowed me to store the file on my desktop for inspection. Or just use the File Save "webpage complete" function of I.E.

There is also a javascript on my AOL site that facilitates the flip for folks using the old site: http://members.aol.com/standcmr/flip1.js will allow saving to desktop. The last 14 lines is the stuff to look at first. Those lines produce the entire "flip page" except for the html and script tags and reference to some functions defined earlier in the script file.

Most folks are making web sites with nice authoring software and don't have to mess around with javascripts. This site was born before the authoring software made its appearance, and I just left it that way. I've still a lot of things on my "to do" list that lie ahead of porting the site to a new parametric representation.